The ongoing debate about whether diet or exercise is more important for overall health continues to spark discussions among health enthusiasts, researchers, and professionals. Both diet and exercise contribute to a healthy lifestyle, and understanding their individual roles and how they interact can help us make informed decisions about our well-being.
Understanding Weight Loss
Weight loss refers to the process of intentionally reducing body mass, typically involving a decrease in both fat and sometimes muscle tissue. It is often pursued for health reasons, aesthetic goals, or to alleviate medical conditions related to excess weight. This process is primarily achieved through a combination of dietary modifications, increased physical activity, and lifestyle adjustments. The fundamental principle underlying weight loss is creating a calorie deficit, where the energy expended exceeds the energy consumed, prompting the body to utilize stored fat for energy. Successful and sustainable weight loss requires a holistic approach that considers individual needs, preferences, and the adoption of healthy habits to maintain the desired results over time. It also requires behavior change.
The Benefits of Diet
A well-structured diet extends far beyond nourishment. The food you consume provides your body with essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and energy required for its day-to-day functions. A balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, whole grains, and healthy fats can offer numerous benefits:
- Weight Management: Weight loss or maintenance is often closely tied to the types and amounts of food you consume. A balanced diet high in nutrient-dense foods can help with weight management goals. A practical and sustainable diet that's nonrestrictive can also aid in weight management.
- Disease Prevention: Certain dietary components, such as antioxidants in fruits and vegetables, have been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fiber, and heart-healthy fats can aid in disease prevention throughout life.
- Energy Levels: The right balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats in your diet can sustain your energy levels throughout the day, enhancing your productivity and overall mood. It can also aid in blood sugar regulation and satiety.
- Digestive Health: A diet rich in fiber promotes healthy digestion and can prevent issues like constipation and gastrointestinal discomfort. Fiber also aids in blood sugar regulation, satiety, weight loss, and weight management.
The Benefits of Exercise
Regular physical activity brings about a transformative impact that goes well beyond the surface. Through consistent engagement in exercise, individuals unlock a range of remarkable outcomes that contribute to an enhanced quality of life. The effects of exercise ripple through various facets of health, both physical and mental, fostering positive changes that promote well-being. An active lifestyle paves the way for a holistic approach to personal growth, vitality, and overall health.
- Cardiovascular Health: Engaging in aerobic exercises like running, swimming, or cycling improves heart health, lowers blood pressure, and reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
- Muscle Strength and Bone Health: Resistance training, such as lifting weights, helps build muscle mass and maintain bone density, which is particularly important as we age.
- Mental Well-being: Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, often referred to as "feel-good" hormones. This can alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression, contributing to better mental health.
- Metabolic Rate: Regular physical activity can increase your metabolic rate, making it easier to manage your weight.
The Synergy Between Diet and Exercise
The interplay between diet and exercise has long been recognized as a cornerstone in achieving optimal health and well-being. When seeking to lose weight, the synergy between these two components becomes particularly crucial. The combination of diet and exercise to lose weight forms a potent strategy that addresses not only caloric intake but also energy expenditure. This holistic approach recognizes that what we fuel our bodies with, alongside the physical activities we engage in, collectively shape our journey toward weight loss and a healthier lifestyle.
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- Weight Loss: While diet plays a more significant role in weight loss, exercise can enhance the results by increasing calorie expenditure and preserving lean muscle mass.
- Performance: Proper nutrition fuels your workouts, enhancing your performance and endurance during exercise.
- Muscle Gain: Protein intake is essential for muscle growth. Combining a protein-rich diet with resistance training can optimize muscle development.
- Long-Term Health: The combination of a balanced diet and regular exercise is a potent strategy for reducing the risk of chronic diseases and promoting longevity.
Diet vs. Exercise for Weight Loss: A Closer Look
While both diet and exercise are important for weight loss, it’s generally easier to manage your calorie intake by modifying your diet than it is to burn significantly more calories through exercise. This may be why the 80/20 rule has become popular, as it states that weight loss is the result of 80% diet and 20% exercise.
For example, if you’re aiming for a daily calorie deficit of 500 calories, you could consume 400 fewer calories (80%) by eating lower calorie dishes, smaller portion sizes, and fewer snacks. Then, you only need to burn 100 calories (20%) from exercise.
For many people, this is easier than trying to burn 500 calories each day from exercise. Burning this many calories every day requires a significant amount of movement - plus, it’s time-consuming, taxing on the body, and rarely sustainable.
To illustrate, a person who weighs 154 pounds (70 kg) would need to cycle on an exercise bike for 1 hour at moderate intensity to burn 525 calories. Meanwhile, they could cut out 520 calories by skipping out on a venti Green Tea Frappuccino from Starbucks.
An easy way to manage calorie intake and promote weight loss without counting calories is to focus on eating whole, minimally processed foods that are high in fiber, protein, and healthy fats.
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How Exercise Supports Weight Loss
There are many ways that exercise supports weight loss.
Strength training helps preserve and build muscle mass, which can increase your metabolic rate over time so your body burns more calories, even at rest. Furthermore, a single strength training session can increase your metabolic rate for up to 72 hours.
Aerobic exercise such as walking, jogging, or cycling - especially at a low to moderate intensity for 30 minutes or longer - can burn a significant number of calories in a single session and help promote a calorie deficit.
Regular exercise may also help manage hunger by regulating your hunger hormones. This may help prevent overeating and excess snacking. That being said, excessive exercise may increase appetite as well as injury risk, so moderation is best.
Finally, by burning extra calories and increasing your metabolic rate, regular physical activity allows you to have more flexibility with your diet, making weight loss more enjoyable and less restrictive.
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Exercising regularly also supports weight maintenance after weight loss, which is critical.
Recommendation: A Combination of Diet and Exercise
Although the 80/20 rule is a helpful guideline, you don’t have to follow it precisely. Instead, focus on making positive changes to your diet and exercise routine that work for you. For instance, you may prefer achieving your daily calorie deficit 50% from diet and 50% from exercise. This means you’ll spend more time and energy exercising - but in return, you won’t need to limit your food intake as much. The key for healthy, long-term weight loss and management is to use both diet and exercise.
In fact, one older review showed that combining modest calorie restriction and exercise was the best way to achieve significant weight loss. In some cases, combining the two led to over five times more lost weight compared with using exercise alone.
A 2023 systematic review found that adults with obesity lost the most weight using a combination of strength training and endurance exercise for at least 175 minutes each week, plus a customized diet in which they ate fewer calories than they burned each day.
Ultimately, combining dietary changes and regular exercise can help you achieve more meaningful and sustainable weight loss in the long term.
While it may be easier to manage how many calories you consume, regular exercise helps preserve lean muscle and burn additional calories. Therefore, both diet and exercise are important for weight loss, and combining the two will optimize results.
Diet and Exercise for Heart Health
Both exercise and diet play significant roles in heart health.
Benefits of Diet
The foods we eat can support or hinder heart health.
The dietary patterns associated with reduced heart disease risk are centered around minimally processed vegetables, fruit, whole grains, healthy fats, and lean animal and plant-based proteins while being low in sodium.
For example, the well-established Mediterranean diet promotes heart health. It’s high in healthy unsaturated fats from olive oil, fish, and nuts, dietary fiber from whole grains and vegetables, and antioxidants that help fight harmful molecules called free radicals.
Plus, it contains limited amounts of saturated fats and added sugars due to its focus on fresh, minimally processed foods.
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) is another evidence-based eating style similar to the Mediterranean diet. It encourages less sodium and more potassium and fiber by prioritizing whole, minimally processed foods like vegetables, fruit, and whole grains.
Diets high in saturated fats, sodium, added sugars, and refined carbohydrates from processed and red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, baked goods, and highly processed snack foods like chips are linked with a higher risk of heart disease.
Benefits of Exercise
Numerous studies have shown that exercise can help lower your risk of heart disease, decrease blood pressure and LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, increase your heart’s size and strength, and improve cardiorespiratory fitness.
Even if you don’t lose weight, you may experience these benefits when exercising regularly. Moderate to high intensity cardio exercise strengthens the heart, allowing it to push more blood into your body with each heartbeat. This decreases the amount of stress on the heart and arteries, which lowers the risk of heart disease.
What’s more, regular exercise can reduce your risk of developing type 2 diabetes - which is strongly linked to heart disease - by improving insulin sensitivity and blood sugar control.
General recommendations include getting either 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, 75 minutes of high intensity exercise, or a combination of the two each week for optimal heart health.
Even a low intensity aerobic activity such as walking may reduce your heart disease risk.
Keep in mind that if you have heart disease or another chronic condition, you should speak with your healthcare professional before starting a new exercise program.
Recommendation: Combination of Diet and Exercise
Combining a nutritious diet with regular physical activity is one of the most effective ways to reduce your risk of heart disease.
Other lifestyle changes that improve your heart health include quitting smoking, limiting or eliminating alcohol, maintaining a weight that is healthy for your body, and managing stress.
Consuming a minimally processed, whole-food diet rich in healthy fats, fiber, and lean protein is linked to better heart health. Along with this, regular exercise keeps your heart stronger and reduces certain risk factors for heart disease.
The Role of Diet and Exercise in Other Areas of Health
Diet and exercise can play important roles in other areas of your health, too.
Building Muscle
To build muscle, you need to do resistance training with progressive overload and eat enough protein throughout the day. Progressive overload involves gradually increasing exercise volume and load - through higher weight, more sets, or more reps - to stress the muscles.
If you don’t challenge your muscles through resistance training, you won’t build muscles simply by eating a high protein diet. Likewise, if you do engage in strength training exercise but don’t consume enough protein, it will be difficult to gain muscle.
Therefore, both diet and exercise are important for building muscle.
Mental Health
A nutritious diet rich in healthy fats, fiber, probiotics, vegetables, and fruit is associated with improved mental well-being and a lower risk of anxiety and depression. Further, low levels of certain nutrients including zinc, vitamins D and B12, and omega-3 fats are linked with worsened mental health.
Exercise can also provide both immediate and long-term benefits to mental health. It promotes the release of mood-boosting endorphins - such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine - that temporarily improve your mood and stress levels.
Additionally, regular exercise is associated with lower rates of moderate depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions.
In addition to any treatment recommended to you by your healthcare professional, regular exercise and a nutritious diet may improve your mental well-being.
Overfat Adults: The Importance of Combining Diet and Exercise
For adults who are overfat, a hypocaloric balance is necessary for changing body composition, but the effectiveness for establishing imbalance does not equate with the effectiveness for body compositional changes, or any biomarkers associated with metabolic issues. There is a necessity to include exercise in combination with diet to effectively elicit changes in body composition and biomarkers of metabolic issues. More importantly, the combination, resistance training (RT) was more effective than endurance training (ET) or combination of RT and ET, particularly when progressive training volume of 2-to-3 sets for 6-to-10 reps at an intensity of ≥75% 1RM, utilizing whole body and free-weight exercises, at altering body compositional measures (ES of 0.47, 0.30, and 0.40 for loss of BM, FM, and retention of FFM respectively) and reducing total cholesterol (ES = 0.85), triglycerides (ES = 0.86) and low-density lipoproteins (ES = 0.60). Additionally RT was more effective at reducing fasting insulin levels (ES = 3.5) than ET or ET and RT. Even though generally lower ES than RT, the inclusion of ET was more effective when performed at high intensity (e.g. ≥70% VO2max or HRmax for 30-minutes 3-4x’s/wk), or in an interval training style than when utilizing the relatively common prescribed method of low-to-moderate (e.g., 50-70% VO2max or HRmax for at least equal time) steady state method, ES of 0.35, 0.39, and 0.13 for BM, FM, and FFM respectively.
Reframing the Diet vs. Exercise Debate
All too often, the effectiveness of exercise is only considered within the boundaries of weight loss. What are the best workouts for weight loss? How many times a week do you need to workout to lose weight? How many calories can you burn? Physical activity does have notable benefits if you have weight loss goals. It contributes to your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which is the amount of calories (energy) you burn in a day. Your TDEE is important because if you create a calorie surplus (you eat more than you need), you’ll gain weight. This has led many people to assume if you want to lose weight, you just have to exercise more. But that’s not exactly true.
Exercise only contributes 5 percent to your TDEE, known as exercise activity thermogenesis. If you’re eating more than your TDEE, you’ll gain weight, even if you’re working hard in the gym. You might burn 500 calories during your workout, but you’re overeating by 1,000. You’re chasing your tail. A 2012 randomized controlled trial (the gold standard of research) that lasted a year looked at whether diet, physical activity or both combined was most effective for weight loss. But that doesn’t mean you should deprioritize exercise. Exercise has benefits that go beyond weight loss, and studies show that when a good diet is combined with regular exercise, the body is healthier and weight loss is maximized over the long term.
The Unique and Unparalleled Benefits of Exercise
- Boosted Metabolic Rate: When you build muscle through exercise, you can actually boost your TDEE. Muscle contains fat-burning enzymes, meaning it uses more calories while at rest, which can increase your metabolism.
- Improves Mental Health: Numerous studies have found that engaging in a regular physical activity routine helps to alleviate depression, anxiety, stress and other cognitive or mood-related conditions. One study observed the effects of exercise on rates of depression by asking a group of participants to attend exercise classes for ten weeks. The researchers found that the intervention group experienced a 30 percent decline in depression.
- Slows Down Aging: According to research, from the age of 30, we lose up to eight percent of our muscle mass every ten years. A loss of muscle mass results in reduced mobility and strength, poor balance, a decreased metabolic rate and accelerated aging. Exercise builds muscle mass and bone density to keep us physically younger.
- Lower Disease Risk: Regular exercise reduces your risk of developing cardiovascular disease like stroke and heart disease, as well as obesity and type II diabetes. This is because exercise improves insulin sensitivity, lowers blood pressure, improves leptin sensitivity, strengthens heart and lung capacity, reduces blood clots, and helps maintain a healthy weight.
- Stress Relief: Exercise is a powerful stress reliever. When we exercise, endorphins and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are released. Plus, humans are designed to move. It’s in our DNA. There’s something about getting energy flowing through exercise that can help you become more present. A study published in the journal Acta Psychologica found that going on a one to two mile run improves your mood, decreases stress, and boosts cognitive performance more than a meditation session is able to.
- Cognitive Enhancer: When you get your blood pumping during a workout, you also increase blood and oxygen flow to the brain. This helps it perform better. The hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, actually increases as a result of regular exercise. If you’re fighting through brain fog, get moving!
- Improved Cardiovascular Health: The more you push yourself physically, the stronger your cardio system can get. Your heart and lungs may become more efficient at transporting oxygen and blood around your body. Your vital organs and muscles may get healthier and work optimally.
- Social Benefits: If you’ve ever tried a group workout class or joined a sports team, you’ll notice that the exercise part is just one of many benefits. You’ll also enjoy connecting socially with like-minded people. Exercise can combat loneliness and introduce you to people with similar interests.
- Confidence Builder: You build confidence in yourself when you make a commitment to bettering yourself, and you actually stick to it. Exercise is one of the easiest and most effective ways to do that. Set an exercise goal and decide every day that you can do it. This helps to build confidence and assurance in your abilities, which transfers into other aspects of your life.
- Fights Inflammation: During a tough workout, you put your body under brief periods of stress and inflammation. To recover, your body triggers a powerful anti-inflammatory response like increased antioxidant production.